Apple needs to start making nice with Wall Street, analysts said Thursday as investors hammered the company's stock.

The sell-off put Apple a hair's-breadth away from losing its status as the world's most valuable company. At Thursday's close, it was worth $423 billion, just 1.6 percent more than No. 2 Exxon Mobil Corp.

The plunge was set off by Apple's quarterly earnings report late Wednesday, which suggested the company's nearly decade-long growth spurt is slowing drastically.

The stock ended down $63.51 or 12 percent, at $450.50. It last traded that low a year ago. It was the biggest one-day percentage drop in the stock since Sept. 29, 2008, when two Wall Street brokerages downgraded the stock because of the recession. In dollar terms, it was the largest ever single-day change in the stock.

Should Apple try to win back the investors who are fleeing? No, analysts say. Investors who bought the stock on the way up will be chasing the next hot stock. The company needs to make itself appealing to a new crop of people who've never considered the stock, analysts say, by doing what Wall Street wants and doling out more of its massive cash pile in the form of more generous dividends and stock buybacks.

Apple's profits for the October-December quarter were flat compared with the year before. It still managed to grow revenue 18 percent from the year before, but the cost of starting up production lines for multiple new products like the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini meant that less revenue flowed to the bottom line. The company's gross profit margin in the recent quarter was 38.6 percent compared with 44.7 percent a year earlier.

Of even more concern to investors: Apple's forecast sales growth for the current quarter is around 7 percent compared with a year ago _far from the 50-percent-plus rate it's often hit in recent years.

Apple usually lowballs its forecasts, but Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer indicated the company will provide more realistic figures from now on.

To be sure, Apple products haven't lost their appeal. Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company couldn't make enough iPhones, iPads and iMacs in the holiday quarter to satisfy demand. The problem is rather that Apple hasn't launched a revolutionary new product since the iPad in 2010.

It's a lot to ask that a company reinvent consumer electronics every few years, but Apple did it three times in a decade with the launch